I don't think the term is what you're searching for, but maybe it evolved in a similar way - I just stumbled upon it from the other side - what does "Wahrscheinlichkeit" mean? Something seems true - 'scheint wahr'.
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user unknownSep 12 '11 at 20:24

2 Answers
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Truthiness isn't a minimization of the word truth, though — what Colbert did when he invented that phrase was incorrectly turn the word truth into the adjective truthy by adding -y to it (correct adjective would be "true", of course), and then turn it back into a noun by adding -ness.

If you wanted to do a similar thing to the word Wahrheit, you'd end up with Wahrheitlichkeit or Wahrheitigkeit, or, if you want fewer syllables, you can start out with wahr and get Wahrlichkeit or Wahrigkeit.

Out of those options, I like "Wahrheitlichkeit" best, but none of them are quite as funny or pithy as "truthiness".

In general, you can minimize German terms by adding the suffixes -chen (Schirmchen, Kätzchen) or -lein (Häuslein, Tischlein). The vowel often becomes an umlaut when you do this.

German dialects also have minimizing suffixes of their own, e.g. -le in Swabian or -erl in Bavarian.

+1 for the etymological explanation. truthiness is just a example for possible Verniedlichung, the question is more how to build such verniedlichende Begriffe in general in German. Wahrheit isnt probably the best term to show this.
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HauserSep 11 '11 at 11:09

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I edited my answer to be a bit more general. Someone else should probably add some more detail on how to know whether it's "-chen" or "-lein", or when to use an umlaut, because I actually don't know what the rules are there.
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CassSep 11 '11 at 15:57

+1 imo Wahrheiterl is just perfect lol. If possible try to generalize this a bit more, truthiness was just a single motivating example. Probably the solution to this problem lies proper use of dialects, they seem to offer more phonetic options than high german, the high german options sound pretty artificial
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HauserSep 11 '11 at 11:19